Social Software

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So I’m reading Clay Shirky’s intriguing essay about social software, and a thought occurs to me about a telephone conversation I was having today.

Shirky:

It’s very difficult to coordinate a conference call, because people can’t see one another, which makes it hard to manage the interrupt logic. In Joi’s conference call, the interrupt logic got moved to the chat room. People would type “Hand,” and the moderator of the conference call will then type “You’re speaking next,” in the chat. So the conference call flowed incredibly smoothly.

Meanwhile, in the chat, people are annotating what people are saying. “Oh, that reminds me of So-and-so’s work.” Or “You should look at this URL…you should look at that ISBN number.” In a conference call, to read out a URL, you have to spell it out — “No, no, no, it’s w w w dot net dash…” In a chat window, you get it and you can click on it right there. You can say, in the conference call or the chat: “Go over to the wiki and look at this.”

This is a broadband conference call, but it isn’t a giant thing. It’s just three little pieces of software laid next to each other and held together with a little bit of social glue. This is an incredibly powerful pattern. It’s different from: Let’s take the Lotus juggernaut and add a web front-end.

When I was on the GNOME release team, we used to do these Friday morning conference calls, and at the same time we’d be talking on the phone we’d all be in the IRC channel. Mostly people just made jokes, but occasionally some useful piece of information would change hands, without interrupting.

Which made me think about an increasingly common phenomenon when I’m interviewing people on the phone. They’ll look something up on the web or their hard drive as we’re talking, or email a document that comes through while we’re still talking. But what if, in a takeoff on the Ito example above, we were on the phone and had an AIM window open at the same time? Tom could have pasted a URL that I could have clicked on as we spoke. He could have pasted the precise quote for me. This is powerful stuff if/when we figure out how to use it.

Palm Puke

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I am a happy new Palm pilot user (the low-end Zire), and I’m particularly impressed with the thoughtfulness they apply to usability issues. But that thoughtfulness does not necessarily extend to their marketing efforts. In today’s inbox was the company’s monthly Palm newsletter, with a distinctly Fourt of July theme:

You can bet your britches that if Palm had a time machine, Thomas
Jefferson would scoop up the Palm? Tungsten? W handheld faster
than you can say “Declaration of Independence”.

What did Moon Unit Zappa so eloquently say? “Gag me with a spoon.”

More Dancing Bearware

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Joel Spolsky in his blog today links to a devastating critique of that annoying help setup wizard you get in Windows every time you start up an application’s help for the first time:

The first problem with this dialog is that it’s distracting. You are trying to find help in the help file. You do not, at that particular moment, give a hoot whether the database is small, big, customized, or chocolate-covered. In the meanwhile, this wicked, wicked dialog is giving you little pedantic lectures that it must create a list (or database). There are about three paragraphs there, most of which are completely confusing. There’s the painfully awkward phrase “your help file(s)”. You see, you may have one or more files. As if you cared at this point that there could be more than one. As if it made the slightest amount of difference. But the programmer who worked on that dialog was obviously distressed beyond belief at the possibility that there might be more than one help file(s) and it would be incorrect to say help file, now, wouldn’t it?

Spolsky’s rant is right on track with Havoc Pennington’s “Free software and good user interfaces”, which much influenced me on these issues. From Pennington:

A traditional free software application is configurable so that it has the union of all features anyone’s ever seen in any equivalent application on any other historical platform. Or even configurable to be the union of all applications that anyone’s ever seen on any historical platform (Emacs *cough*).

Does this hurt anything? Yes it does. It turns out that preferences have a cost. Of course, some preferences also have important benefits – and can be crucial interface features. But each one has a price, and you have to carefully consider its value. Many users and developers don’t understand this, and end up with a lot of cost and little value for their preferences dollar.

Now Spolsky:

It has been said that design is the art of making choices. When you design a trash can for the corner, you have to make choices between conflicting requirements. It needs to be heavy so it won’t blow away. It needs to be light so the trash collector can dump it out. It needs to be large so it can hold a lot of trash. It needs to be small so it doesn’t get in peoples’ way on the sidewalk. When you are designing, and you try to abdicate your responsibility by forcing the user to decide something, you’re probably not doing your job. Someone else will make an easier program that accomplishes the same task with less intrusions, and most users will love it.

July

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To my Canadian friends, happy Canada Day.


If the first of July it be rainy weather,
’twill rain more or less for four weeks together.

Looks like we’re screwed here in the desert.

Vacation

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I’m having a hard time sitting down to blog the vacation just completed. It’s just too expansive, too many, too much. I think I’m better off just chipping away.

Nora, Tom, Lisa and Lissa at the beach

Let’s start here. That’s, left to right, Nora, Tom, Lisa and Lissa on the beach at Chatham, on Cape Cod. As a kid from the beaches of L.A., I didn’t really grasp the Cape Cod beach thing until this trip. I’ve only been once before, in the dead of winter, and it was beautiful but not beachie somehow.

My sister’s husband, Tom, spent much of his adult life on Cape Cod, and he did a great job of showing us around, explaining the infrastructure of the tourist world there (he’s made his living in that infrastructure since he was a teenager), and then we sat a lot on the beach. Waves. The sound of waves. The smell of sea air. Nothin’ like it.

Lisa and Nora at the beach

That’s my sister Lisa on the left, and daughter Nora, kicking at the cold Atlantic water. It was colder than the Pacific beach water of my youth, and the macho men would dive in to show off for their gals before jumping out with a shiver and shake. But the kids, they are tougher, and the kids splashed and played, body-surfing the slivers of waves and having that great goodness that is a beach as a child.

Drought ‘N’ Stuff

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Much work went into this, my opus on climate variability, drought, and life in the southwest. I hope it does not sound immodest if I say I am more than a little proud of the results.

L allowed as how she thinks it’s the best thing I’ve ever done, and who am I to argue with her expert opinion?

(P.S. If the link doesn’t work, please let me know. I think it’s in the free area of the site, but I might just have a cookie set.)

Bad Dad

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Bad Dad wouldn’t let Nora go to the Harry Potter party Friday night, as we needed to get up at the crack of dawn Saturday morning to get on an airplane. So she and Lissa conspired to hit the 24-hour Wal-Mart before we left. 5 a.m., they bought the second one they sold (no long lines or kids in outrageous costumes at Wal-Mart, one guesses).

By the time we hit the security checkpoint at the airport, Nora was already on page 109. She read straight through the flight, and would be done if not for the necessities of our vacation intervening. But she pronounces it good.

No giveaways, though. We’re waiting in line.

On the Road Again

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Geez, it seems like I’ve been travelling a lot lately. I’m sort of a homebody, but I’m really looking forward to this next trip, a week back east visiting sister Lisa and her husband Tom in Connecticut, with a couple of days down to Pennsylvania to see my Uncle Kelly and a couple of days with Tom and Lisa up on Cape Cod.

See y’all whenever….